Assignment complete, twenty years later

In one section of his book The Great Good Thing, novelist Andrew Klavan describes how he bluffed his way through high school and college, not reading anything he was assigned. He doesn’t say what he majored in, but apparently he got an English degree without reading a book. He only tells of one occasion where a professor called his bluff.

Even though he saw no value in the books he was assigned, he bought and saved every one of them. Then sometime near the end of college he began to read and enjoy the books he hadn’t touched.

I wanted to read their works now, all of them, and so I began. After I graduated, after Ellen and I moved together to New York, I piled the books I had bought in college in a little forest of stacks around my tattered wing chair. And I read them. Slowly, because I read slowly, but every day, for hours, in great chunks. I pledged to myself I would never again pretend to have read a book I hadn’t or fake my way through a literary conversation or make learned reference on the page to something I didn’t really know. I made reading part of my daily discipline, part of my workday, no matter what. Sometimes, when I had to put in long hours to make a living, it was a real slog. …

It took me twenty years. In twenty years, I cleared those stacks of books away. I read every book I had bought in college, cover to cover. I read many of the other books by the authors of those books and many of the books those authors read and many of the books by the authors of those books too.

There came a day when I was in my early forties … when it occurred to me that I had done what I set out to do. …

Against all odds, I had managed to get an education.